Chapter 1: What happens during the first night in the wilderness?
I make my living sitting very still in places most people never see after dark. I shoot catalogs and magazine spreads, owls slotted between saguaros, bobcats ghosting a wash, ringtails sneaking into old mine adits. It's unglamorous if you don't like waiting. I do like waiting. I like charts and windchecks and setting up a scene the way a bowhunter sets a stand.
You read the ground, you look for sign, you stack quiet advantages, you try to become background, and then animals step back into their routines like you were never there. This happened in late October, on Bureau of Land Management terrain along the east side of Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, a long spit of country between Quartzsite and Yuma.
I'd pulled a small assignment to chase desert predators with night vision, coyotes in particular, because the publication wanted images of how they move when heat is down and traffic thins. The plan was three nights out. I slept in the Jeep with the seats down and worked out of a pop-up ground blind I set 20 yards off a two-track that died in a dry arroyo. It was a good pinch point.
mouse tracks scribbled in the sand quail dust baths scat with mesquite beans and hair i bait nothing i sit where prey and water make predators logical the first afternoon i drove the miles of washboard until the cell bars fell away and the chatter of the interstate faded
I chose a slightly raised bench for camp to keep flash floods out of the picture, tuned my satellite messenger to send a check-in once at dusk and once at dawn, and started walking sign. Coyotes were around. You can tell from the way a line of pads moves straight through gravel, from the scat on a rock and from the night music if you get lucky. I found something else too.
A big dog print with a long center pad. Wide splay. Almost too clean. It wasn't unusual enough to bother me. Out here you get feral dogs, ranch dogs, hybrids. The desert makes opportunists. I set the blind in the shadow of a Palo Verde and broke a small circle of stones for my stove.
Gear went where it always goes, tripod legs splayed and balanced low, gimbal head leveled, Sony camera body with the 200-600mm zoom lens mounted and a 1.4x teleconverter attached, backup camera body with a 70-200mm lens in case something came inside my circle.
I strapped a pair of passive infrared floodlights to the Palo Verde and another steel post, set to 850 nanometers so the glow is invisible to human eyes and about as subtle as you can be without going full thermal. I tested autofocus against a foam block at 80 yards. I checked the zipper door of the blind twice. I locked the jeep. I always lock the jeep. You do it until it's muscle memory.
People aren't the only clever ones. As twilight went purple over the castle dome mountains, a single coyote barked way out in the flats. A dry yip answered north. It felt like the right choice of spot. I boiled water, ate a pouch meal that tasted like warm salt, and went to work. Coyotes are confident. They watch you break your silhouette and they clock everything.
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Chapter 2: What unusual animal behavior is observed during the night?
Tail level, feet stepping in line to save energy, nose pulling air with intent. I watched him lope parallel to the wash. I took a few frames when he cut across the pinch point. He heard my shudder even with the silent mode and stopped. Head up, ears like points. A small drop of saliva stretched from his lip and snapped when he closed his mouth.
He looked past the blind at the jeep and then back to where I was. It wasn't the usual look of, I hear something. It was inventory. Where's the human? Where's the box that smells like him? Where's the heat? Where's the hard shelter? He circled once, never crossing my wind, and faded. I wrote it off as a dominant male patrolling his groove and felt mildly proud of where I'd chosen to sit.
Around midnight I heard soft steps in the gravel around the jeep. I kept still and watched through the lens and waited for a head to swing into the infrared. It never did. Whatever made the steps paced the far side and left. Morning was windless and mean with sun. I walked the wash edge and found pads, plenty of them.
One track line stopped at the jeep's back corner, came tight to the passenger door, then moved on. Some scratches scuffed the dust near the handle. That was a first. I wrote a note in my field book and used a baby wipe to clean my own oily prints off the door metal, so I'd see anything new the next day. I checked the blind stakes and let them bite deeper.
Then I nap to buy hours for later, because the second night is always better than the first. Your smell settles. Your camp becomes a fact. The second evening was colder. I added a fleece and a beanie and a chemical hand warmer in my right pocket to keep dexterity. I topped off my batteries.
I set a second camera on a low tripod aimed at the jeep doors, manual focus at 6 feet, aperture opened as wide as it would go, fast shutter speed, interval timer running because some part of me wanted to know what had paced there. I set a boot with a pebble balanced on the tailgate as an improvised alarm. If anything jostled it, it would crash and I'd hear it.
The wind went steady from the west around 9. Coyotes started their gossip chorus three ridges over around 9.30. I could tell there were at least three. Around 10.30 the big one came again. He worked the same line, bolder this time.
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Chapter 3: How does the protagonist prepare for potential threats?
Less pausing, less smelling. He cut the pinch and then circled and did a strange thing. He stopped dead at the exact angle where the infrared floodlights would have been in a human's peripheral. He looked through my setup, not at my lens, but at the blackness where glass was inside the blind. It's hard to explain. There's a difference between an animal keying on motion and keying on intention.
This felt like the second. I didn't shoot. His eyes glowed ghost white in the infrared, and the sensor will sometimes catch that wash and blow the whole exposure. I held. He broke off and moved toward the jeep. My second camera's interval timer clacked a few times. He stopped and flicked an ear at that, then eased to the passenger door again.
He lifted onto the rock slider with a front paw, stretched tall, and pressed at the handle with his muzzle. Not pawing, not scratching, a press and a pull, like he'd seen the cause and effect. It didn't move because I lock my doors, always. He dropped and stepped back, and then he did the thing that wrecked my sense of category.
He stood up again, this time pushing fully onto his hind legs, balancing like a man does when he reaches for something on a counter. He leaned, and one front paw hooked the handle. and I heard the very clear, very human sound of a door latch reluctant against the lock's resistance. A click.
Not the big clunk you get when the door opens, just the click of a handle trying to actuate a locked mechanism. I didn't breathe. He dropped to four legs, tilted his head, and turned, slowly, like a thought passing across a mind. In infrared, eyes go bright and dead at the same time. He looked straight at the blind, straight through the bush, across a hundred yards of dark.
I know he can't see infrared, but he looked like he could see me. For a long minute nothing moved. The desert held its breath. I felt my heartbeat in my ears and forced it down. I thought through steps, horn, headlights, make it loud and surprising, get in the jeep, leave. But leaving at night on a two-track is how you catch a washout wrong and bury to the frame. He dropped his gaze first.
He patted around the back of the jeep. The boot with the pebble teetered but didn't fall. I didn't like that he knew exactly where to place weight. From then on, I didn't doze. I watched. He didn't come back into the infrared illumination for almost an hour.
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Chapter 4: What strange tracks are discovered in the morning?
When he did, it was at the edge of the cone, further than before, making lazy S-patterns, nose up and then down, like he was searching for my boundaries. Once, he broke to the far side of the wash and disappeared for 20 minutes. When he came back, he came low and quick and stopped behind the blind at the only corner where I hadn't trimmed a line of creosote branches.
I heard his feet through the fabric. I smelled him. Rank, hot, wild meat and mesquite blossoms. The blind's back panel pushed inward just slightly, convex to concave, like a chest exhaling. Then it stopped. The zipper tab on the door rustled. He was touching it. A claw or a tooth touched the metal. It tapped. It didn't pull.
I eased the air horn out of my side pocket and gave it a short, flat blast. The panel popped back. The sound went hard into the night and died like it does in open country. He didn't run. He took three steps away and sat down. I could hear the weight settle on his hips. I could imagine the head tilt.
We did that for five full minutes, me facing a zipper, him sitting in blackness three feet behind cloth. When he left, he went toward the jeep again. The interval timer went tick, tick, tick. Then, finally, the boot fell, a hollow thunk and a rattle of rubber on metal. He startled right then. He didn't like the chaotic sound. He pulled back and paced. Then he slid off into the wash and vanished.
No coyotes answered his going. The night stayed weirdly silent after that. Just before dawn, the temperature hit its bottom, and the sky got its first of three shades of gray. I broke the blind and stowed the glass because I didn't want to give myself a reason to stay longer than I had to. I walked to the jeep with my head on a swivel. There were prints. A lot of them.
In the cold sand you get edges like poured concrete. The coyote's hind pads showed crescent moons where claws hadn't dug. The front pads were wrong in a way I couldn't quantify at first. I crouched and made myself be slow. Five toe marks instead of four?
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the deer hair found in the woods?
No. Four, but long and even. The metacarpal pad, the big heart shape, looked stretched, like it had been pressed by weight set too far back. On one track, the drag from the fifth toe was a faint line above the other four, as if a dewclaw had dragged from a higher angle. I've seen that on dogs. I've never seen it paired with the hind leg stance I watched through glass a few hours earlier.
The passenger door had new scratches that weren't just surface dust swirls. I could rake fingernails deep across paint and only get chalk. These were through the oxidized layer. Not key deep, but not something I could wipe away. They clustered at the handle. Three verticals, one diagonal.
I looked through the second camera's frames right there, and then again later in the jeep when I had coffee moving through me and my hands didn't shake. Nothing crisp. Motion blur. No big reveals or monster faces or bodies in mid-stand. One sequence at 2.13 in the morning showed a slope of fur across the edge of frame and the suggestion of a long limb where the joint pinched light.
The last frame before the interval timer shut down from battery save was just the Jeep's paint ghosting the infrared. In it, the handle was centered, and something that could have been a paw, or a hand, or the business end of a muzzle was at the edge of the handle. The shape of it wasn't right for a paw. It looked too narrow before it broadened.
There was the hint of a crease that did not belong to a pad. I should have left after that. The job had deliverables in the can, a coyote patrolling, a portrait with eyes like white coins, a set of tracks with cross light.
Instead I told myself that daylight would clean the weird off and that I was being dramatic, and that I could shift the blind and get a safer angle and a longer lens and work one more sunset. I moved the blind 50 yards farther from the jeep into a triangle of brittle bush where the wash narrowed and the Palo Verde's shadow pooled earlier.
I changed the jeep's orientation so the driver's door faced the blind with no obstructions between. I added a shop-bought magnetic read alarm to the passenger door—one of those cheap units you stick to a window frame that screams if the sensor separates—and wrapped a strip of gaffer's tape around the door handle's seam so I'd see if it shifted.
I wedged a pair of small cowbells under the rocker panel and tied them to a length of light line that tensioned just enough so a tug on the handle would wring them. None of that would stop anything. It would give me seconds. Seconds are everything. Then I drove 8 miles back to a pullout where I got one bar of signal if I stood on the bumper.
I sent a larger check-in than usual to a friend who knows my stupid habits, and I told him, plainly, that something about this coyote was wrong. Too confident, too curious, too handsy with the jeep. He texted back that hybrids and ferals are a thing, and to watch for mange, and to not be a hero. He asked if I was armed, I told him yes, that was true.
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Chapter 6: How does the encounter with the runner unfold?
He told me to send him a pin, to check in at midnight, and to leave if anything felt off. I told him I would, then drove back to my arroyo with the usual guilt that I was making a story where there wasn't one. The third evening started quietly and stayed that way long enough that I believed I'd scared the animal off with human nonsense.
I watched a tarantula cross the wash like a walking hairbrush. I filmed a kangaroo rat kick sand over its burrow. A great horned owl drifted once across my infrared cone and kept going like a ship through fog. The air smelled like creosote and dust. The north wind came light and clean around 9. At 10.20 the read alarm chirped once and then screamed. The cowbells rang a bright silly peal.
I flinched hard enough to bump the lens into the blind sleeve. I fumbled the key fob in my pocket and thumbed the panic button. The jeep's horn went full blast, lights strobing, hazards pulsing. The alarm rolled across the arroyo and up the cholla-spiked hillside and then hung there like a held breath.
The read alarm cut out when the handle went back to rest, then chirped again, then screamed again. He was testing it, pulling and releasing, pulling and releasing. I didn't hit the panic button a second time. I let the Jeep do its whole cycle and die and reset. In the wash of the infrared light, a form backed off three steps and stood. Tall, not a four-legged stance.
Tall, like a person taking shock, recalibrating. It held like that for a count of two and then it moved sideways, a shuffle with hips working wrong for an animal, like knees bending where no knee should be. It sank to all fours and disappeared under the door line. My heart put its hands around my throat and squeezed.
I put the revolver on the blind floor by my right boot and the bear spray on top of the blind bag. I told myself three rules out loud in a whisper because whispering makes them feel carved in stone. Don't shoot unless something is in the blind. Don't run unless you are running to the jeep and driving. Don't leave it to chance.
I switched my camera to video and pressed record on the main camera body. The infrared floodlights hummed. The desert held its breath again. Or maybe that was me. Nothing happened for a strange amount of time. Ten minutes is forever when alarms just screamed and a thing you watch stand like a man is somewhere between you and your only hard shelter. And then something happened to the blind.
It moved. Not in the wind. Not the little breathing you get when fabric expands and contracts with temperature. It moved the way a tent moves when someone pushes it with a flat palm. One slow press at the back panel. It went in an inch, then two, then more, when weight kept coming. A paw, or a hand, spread behind the fabric and pressed.
I could see the silhouette in infrared like a shadow puppet made of ruined anatomy. Four long digits and a heavier heel where the pad should be. The hand slid sideways until it found the line of the zipper again. The metal tab made that tiny tapping sound as something toyed with it. Subjects learn off motion and reward. It had learned that pulling can be reward.
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Chapter 7: What actions are taken after the strange encounters?
The jeep's handle creaked. The cowbells rang once, twice, then quiet. I pictured the animal, if it was an animal, standing with its chest against the door seam, learning how much pull to put on a handle before the read alarm complains and when the complaint stops, testing the tolerance until it could get a full pull without a scream. Learning. I had to move.
Fighting the instinct to freeze is the hardest part of work like this. Freezing feels safe, and it kills you slow. I slid the zipper up two inches, pushed the lens into the gap, and lined the Jeep in the screen. The infrared floodlights gave me range. The handle was right in the middle of the frame. The head of the coyote, or the something, rose into the cone like a tide coming up a dune.
For a second it looked perfectly normal. Pointed muzzle, ears, the ridge of a shoulder. Then that muzzle stretched too far forward and angled sideways, and the ear that should have been in frame was wrong by an inch. It wasn't where ears live. I don't know how else to say it. You learn where things go by looking through glass for twenty years. And that ear had slid. The front limb came up.
The paw didn't paw. It rolled like a wrist. Four digits came down on the handle and pulled. The read alarm let out a half chirp and cut off as the magnets separated just slow enough to fool the sensor. The handle came to its stop at the lock. The lock held. The digits flexed. The handle fluttered against the lock like a trapped bird.
The thing's head turned and the bright dead eyes in the infrared looked across a hundred yards and found the sliver of glass where mine were and held them like a pin through a bug. I hit the panic button. The horn and lights went berserk. The thing didn't jerk away this time.
It released the handle and took a smooth, almost bored step backward and stood up straight into full biped, tall enough that the top of its skull just touched the bottom of the side window. It put its right hand, paw, whatever, flat to the glass and it pushed. And there on my screen I watched five splayed digits press and fan against a jeep window I had wiped clean that morning. Not a paw print.
Not a hand print. Something between. The heel of it wrong. The length of two of the fingers even longer. The claws.
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Chapter 8: What reflections does the narrator have after the experience?
Call them that. Black and not curved enough to feel like claws should be. For a tenth of a second I thought I wanted that print.
the part of my brain that thinks in deliverables and cover shots and special licenses wanted it like a kid wants a rare card then the thing leaned its face to the glass and breathed a fog bloom that no coyote makes on a cold pane because coyotes pant and huff they don't lay breath in a long steady fog The fog started an inch above where a coyote's mouth would be.
I dropped the camera and stood up into the roof of the blind. I fumbled for the bear spray, pulled the safety, and with my other hand I shoved the zipper up full and crashed through the doorway with the horn howling and the infrared highlights white hot and the spray can held out like a blunt weapon. I shouted at it. I don't remember the word. It was probably the same no. It was probably my name.
It doesn't matter. The thing left the window and took three steps sideways. And in those three steps, it moved like a man on a grade with his ankles bound, knees bending wrong. hips making the effort up for what the ankles couldn't do. Then it pitched down to all fours in a way that made the back bend in two places instead of one, and it ran, and that part was all coyote.
Fast, low, easy over rock, gone. I went to the jeep, I unlocked the door and got in and locked it again, and I did not look in the back seat, because if something was there the next parts of my life would just go differently forever. I turned the key. The engine caught. The horn cut off when I cancelled the panic. The infrared floodlight still hummed out behind the blind.
I put the jeep in drive and rolled forward onto the two-track, and made the kind of three-point turn you do when your hands know your vehicle better than your head knows fear. I drove out with all my lights on. The rocks caught on skid plates, and the antenna whistled, and the coffee mug I hadn't stowed clacked on plastic.
I didn't look in the mirrors until I was two miles from camp, and when I did, I didn't see anything but dust. I slept three hours at the paved road pullout with the seat reclined and the revolver and the spray on my chest under a jacket and the dawn crowd of snowbirds clattering by in recreational vehicles. Then I drove to a ranger station. I didn't walk in with words like standing or hand.
I walked in with truth that could be categorized. I said I had a coyote too bold around my vehicle. I said it was testing door handles. I said it might be feral or habituated. I asked if anyone had reported aggressive animals in that drainage. The ranger was steady and tired in the way of people who hear a lot of heat and noise for a living. He asked for my GPS pin.
He asked if there was food in the car. I told the truth. Jerky. Peanuts. A cooler with cold packs. Nothing scented left open. He told me about a nuisance report two months earlier near Palm Canyon Road where a coyote had taken a day pack off a chair. He told me about feral dogs. He told me about coy dogs that learn weird tricks when they live too much on the edge of human trash.
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